From Summer’s Love, Winter’s Discontent: A Fiction Anthology
Lonesome Traveller Publishing
Our first real date was at The Rusty Scupper, a chain seafood restaurant that I’m not sure even exists any more. I hadn’t been there before and haven’t been there since. It seemed elegant at the time, but then I was only twenty-one and not the most sophisticated person in the world. Now that I know more I can laugh at myself for thinking The Rusty Scupper was a really nice restaurant. I think Alan took me there because it had a big bar and it was the kind of anonymous place where we would probably not run into anyone we knew. He was, technically, still married. I was, technically, still his student.
We had a couple of drinks and I slipped my foot out of my shoe and place it in Alan’s lap. I had seen that in a movie. It seemed like the thing to do. I might not have been terribly sophisticated about restaurants but I knew for sure that Alan was only taking me out for dinner so that he could take me to bed without feeling too weird about it. I didn’t much care one way or the other. As far as I was concerned we were dating, whether we ate dinner or just screwed. We had taken the leap, finally, after dancing around it for a couple of years. I was about ten days shy of graduation. He had recently moved into an apartment on campus. Seemed like as good a time as any.
Alan was startled to find my foot in his lap. He looked around the restaurant to see if anyone could see us, or if anyone even cared. No one did. At places like The Rusty Scupper everyone has his own agenda; that’s the whole idea of the place, the reason Alan had taken me there to begin with.
I liked playing the femme fatale. I thought Alan expected it of me. I was nearly thirty years his junior and although no beauty, young and still relatively fresh. I hadn’t become jaded about sex yet, hadn’t had too many awful experiences. And I really did adore Alan, had since the first moment I saw him: the thick black/grey hair he wore a shade too long, the deep brown eyes with the deeper pouches under them, his square jaw and trim, small body. He looked like a movie start would look if you saw him close up: beautiful but flawed.
I wiggled my toes around in his crotch and Alan laughed. “That’s enough, young lady!” he said, and removed my foot, daintily, carefully. He was on his third drink and I could see his eyes getting heavy and the skin around his mouth going a little slack. I had also easily felt his arousal at the presence of my foot. But I agreed that that was enough. For now. I wouldn’t push it. He had better get some food into him or the night would not end as planned.
I had shrimp scampi, Alan had swordfish. Everything was supposed to be fresh, fresh from the ocean, which was believable, as the university was in a port city. But the food didn’t taste any better than the Shoney’s I had grown up with; it was just prettier and the service was better. We had a couple glasses of wine. I was impatient. Our conversation was fine but I only really wanted to get him in bed. I wondered why he felt that he had had to buy me dinner. Even twenty five years ago, it really wasn’t necessary.
His apartment was small and barely furnished. He just shrugged. He had taken little, he said, wanting to leave most of it for his wife and six children. Four of his children had been adopted from other countries. He and his wife were good people who did good works. She was a nurse. Alan was one of the university chaplains, as well as a professor of religion. He taught the Bible, among other courses. I took his Bible course my freshman year as it seemed like a good thing to study in an academic setting, free from the loaded atmosphere of church or synagogue. But just watching Alan talk had been a religious experience. I took another class from him my junior year, then another my senior. When he saw me show up to register for that class, he had looked at me over the top of his half glasses and said “Do you think this is wise?”
I said, “I dunno, do you?”
He had the grace to laugh. “Fine, Miss Cline,” he said. “I expect you’re a big enough girl to make up your mind about what classes you want to take.”
“Mmmmm,” I nodded. “And other things.”
Now that I am married to a professor, I wonder if girls say stuff like that to my husband. If he wants them to. If he laughs.
A little more than a week before graduation and we were finally together, in his new apartment, getting ready to do what I had wanted to do from the moment I met him.
“How come we had to wait so long?” I asked him.
“I think you know the reason for that,” Alan admonished me. I felt like I was back in class again.
“So, it’s okay now that you’ve turned in my grade and all?”
“And, I might remind you, I’m no longer married.”
“Well,” I said, “I guess I understand.” It all seemed a little too technical for me. “You know, I wouldn’t have told anyone.”
“Oh, sweetie, do shut up,” Alan sighed, as he kissed my mouth and started to slip the summer dress down from my shoulders. That should have been a clue, I suppose, that we weren’t going to last, not really. That whatever hopes I had that this would be some big romance were not going to materialize. I realized at that moment that I was in love with him and that he wasn’t in love with me and that he also wouldn’t want to know that I was in love with him. He preferred to think of me as the lovely young thing who was just aching to go to bed with him. When I saw him naked I knew I could play that part, especially when I saw the way he looked at me naked, as though he had just had an epiphany or something. I even had a moment when it seemed I could change his mind and make him love me. But I knew better, and I guessed he had been right to make me wait, because the truth was I was wiser than I had been four years earlier. I suddenly knew the difference between sex and love and how it felt to want one or the other or both and how you knew how things would turn out, even if it wasn’t the way you wanted them to. This would be the first affair I would go into with my eyes wide open. Even making love to him felt different because of it. It was transporting. I can yet, all these years later, see his body on mine, his tan and still beautiful skin wrapped around my young firm pale freckled flesh, my breasts still high, my stomach flat and unwrinkled, the soft brown length of my hair flat out against his pillow. If I try a little harder, I can feel him inside of me.
I spent that night with him and most of the others. We didn’t go out to eat again. The week slid toward graduation. I worked up my courage to ask him to the dance the night before the ceremony. I had made no other plans, I was dating no one, hadn’t for months. I felt as though I were already gone from the university and sleeping with Alan only reinforced that feeling; I didn’t feel I could tell my friends what was happening. I was afraid they would be shocked, or worse, would laugh.
Alan grabbed me by both shoulders. We were naked at the time. Had just made love. Had gotten up to get something to drink. I swallowed my pride and said “So will you go with me?”
When he grabbed me by my shoulders, he looked straight in my face, and said “Is that what you want?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then,” he said. “I will meet you there. We’ll set a meeting place and time. I think it will be better like that, don’t you?”
“Fine,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it any more. Whatever he said was fine. I couldn’t believe he had even agreed.
My parents were due to arrive the day of the dance; even though they had recently separated they were coming together for my graduation. I decided I would not tell them about Alan, I would just let him show up at our table, whisk me onto the dance floor. It would be too hard to explain everything beforehand. But as I walked from my dorm room to my parents’ hotel I realized I was crying. I wanted to have Alan on my arm. I wanted some protection from my childhood.
When I got to my parents’ room, my mother opened the door and threw herself at me; she had a drink in her hand, and some of it ran down my back. She was more than halfway to drunk. I kissed my father next and he whispered in my ear, “Your mother’s been like this since we split.” Later, on the walk over to the dance, I said to him, as my mother danced drunkenly up ahead, “So does that mean it was her idea or yours?”
“The divorce?”
“Yeah. Does she drink because it was your idea or hers?”
“We told you, Jessica, the divorce was mutual.”
I stopped and looked at him. How could it just then have occurred to me that Alan was the same age as my father? “Daddy,” I said, “I am old enough now to know that nothing is mutual.”
“Oh, baby,” he said, “It’ll all work out.”
At the dance, I got a beer and wandered around looking for friends. Two of my old roommates were huddled in a corner crying. “What if these really are the best years of our lives?” they wailed as I sat down with them. My father had, of course, told me the same thing when I had left for school four years ago. “If that is true, then we are in deep shit,” I said.
I got up and moved on. It was nearly ten o’clock, my mother was so drunk she could barely stand up, my father looked ready to burst into tears himself and Alan was nowhere to be seen. Suddenly I heard my mother say “Oh, my God, who is that gorgeous man?” Alan was hurrying toward us. He was dressed in jeans and a cotton shirt. His hair was a mess as though he had been running his fingers through it for hours.
“Mary’s disappeared,” he said. Mary was one of his adopted daughters. Apparently she had run away because she was upset about his divorce, he said. He and his wife had called the police but he felt that they both should be at their respective houses in case she decided to come home to one of them. She was only ten. They had adopted her from Ghana. She was, Alan, said, not very street wise.
“Mother, Daddy, this is Alan, a friend of mine,” I said. “I’ll go with you,” I said to Alan.
“No, no,” he said. “You stay here. I’m sorry, Jessica,” he said, and he did, for a moment, look truly sorry. “I’ll call you later. All right?”
I leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. I knew I would never hear from him again.
“Good bye, baby,” I said, in my best grown-up voice.
My mother leaned into me. I could smell the Scotch on her breath and wondered where she had gotten it after she had left the hotel. Only beer was being served at the dance. “Who did you say that man was?” she asked me, “Who did you say that gorgeous man was?”
“He’s my lover, Mother,” I said. Then I turned to my father. “Wanna dance?”
